


Unworthy

by thedevilchicken



Category: Ben-Hur (1959)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Permanent Injury, Physical Disability, Post-Canon, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-02
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2018-04-07 07:54:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4255401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Messala lives. Judah finds him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unworthy

“Do you believe in the gods?” Messala asked, one day. 

“I believe in _God_ ,” Judah replied, quite simply. “I believe in clemency and in forgiveness.”

The look that Judah gave him then was perfectly expectant and he knew precisely why, knew what it was that he wanted. But Messala didn’t ask him to forgive. He asked for nothing; in the months that had passed then since Judah’s arrival, he had asked for nothing at all. 

His concern was not rejection; he knew that if he asked, Judah would forgive him, would forgive him for every last thing that he’d done. But he didn’t ask.

***

When the gates of the villa opened and Judah Ben-Hur then stepped inside, Messala was unsure just how he should react to his appearance. He found he was not entirely sure the man he had once knew had not come there to kill him. He could not have stopped him if he had.

He was dressed as a Roman and not as a Jew, he looked older though it had perhaps been just two years that had passed, but there was no possibility then of mistaking him. The sound of his sandals on the stone path that led there through the garden quickly caught Messala’s attention and he looked up from the low couch on which he was lying, on which he always lay. He saw him, watched him, unsure just how he should react. And so he didn’t, not at first.

“Messala.”

“Judah.”

He’d paid Iras to lie to him and so she had, Messala thought. She’d taken him the news that he was dead and yet there Judah was before him. He should have known much better than to trust her, after all, and in the end.

“Why are you here?”

Judah did not reply. Instead he took the hem of the blanket that covered Messala’s lap despite the bright heat of the afternoon sun and he pulled it away. Messala’s face burned hotly as he did this, with anger and with shame; shame more for _how_ what had happened had happened than the fact it had. Judah looked at him, at the wasting limbs that extended from beneath his tunic, their muscle fading. 

“I came to see,” he said. He dropped the blanket by the couch and he left him there uncovered. 

Messala expected he had seen what he had come there to see. He expected him to go. But Judah didn’t leave.

***

Servants told Judah of their master’s condition while Messala pretended he neither heard nor cared. He heard. He forced down his pride, and he forced himself not to care.

He hadn’t been able to move by his own power since the accident, since the race. He could sit, shuffle to a new position there on his couch in the garden, turn himself in bed, but feeling ended by his sacrum and meant the largest slave he owned carried him here and there whenever required. It was often required. In the dark hours he told himself he had survived and would feel no shame in that survival. He wished to make that true. 

This was the reason for his leaving Rome, his pride stinging when all voices - voices of science and the telling of auguries that he so distrusted - said he would never walk again. He had moved there to the villa on the coast of which all his successes had made him the owner. His finances filled from his estate, from wines and livestock and grain, and kept him safe and distant. He had retreated from the world, into anger and disgust, but would not feel the pity of his acquaintances. Proud as he was, he would not be their entertainment.

Days passed since Judah’s arrival. They ate together and barely spoke, barely moved from their respective couches out by the pool there in the wide open courtyard of the villa, between the colonnades and porches that framed the view out over the sea. They barely even glanced at one another as Messala worked at his accounts and Judah wrote his letters. It was not an easy silence. Messala felt it grate.

It continued for days, until one morning Judah came into the room while his servants were set to bathing him. The fact of it was not the embarrassment he felt - slaves had washed him before his injury and would have continued to do so had he not been injured - but rather Judah’s eyes upon him as he lay upon the couch, quite naked, face cradled upon his arms. 

Judah ushered away the slaves, kindly as he could but quickly. He took the cloth from the bowl and he moved in close. Messala would not, could not let himself react as the cloth came to his back. Judah bathed him then in silence. 

He didn’t ask him to return the following morning. He didn’t ask him to take the cloth, to dip it into the water; he didn’t ask him to run it dripping over his collarbones, sending rivulets running down cool into his navel. He didn’t ask him to return the day after that or the day after that, didn’t ask him to run the cloth over the arches of his feet, over the scars at his atrophied calves, manipulating his numb legs in ways Messala would always watch but never feel. 

He didn’t ask Judah’s hands to stray down between his thighs. He didn’t ask, but he didn’t stop him. 

***

He hadn’t been able to move by himself since the accident. He resented that fact daily, even more so when Judah swept him from his couch one morning and took him to the pool. He didn’t want assistance from Judah Ben-Hur, almost actively opposed it with every fibre of his being. As it happened, he needed no assistance in the water. 

They grew accustomed to swimming each morning through the summer. Messala grew accustomed then to Judah’s company, so often silent, to the sound of sharp shears as Judah cut his hair, to the hundred things he did for him without ever being asked to. He grew accustomed to eating every meal with him, to discussing his estate with his foreman there in Judah’s company, to the feel of callused hands on his skin. 

Summer turned to autumn and then they swam in chilly water. Judah’s strong hands helped him from the pool when they were finished, strong arms carried him inside, helped him to dry as they shivered together. Messala reached out, reached up, fingers in Judah’s wet hair; drops ran over his arm to gather in the crease of his elbow and Judah wiped them away. He didn’t ask permission. Judah let him pull him down.

“Why are you here, Judah?” he asked, his mouth by Judah’s ear, brushing his neck. 

“I wanted to hate you,” Judah said, as if these words were an adequate response, as if they answered the question entirely and perhaps they did. He pulled away and looked at him, naked in the lamplight, with not a trace of pity; Judah had not once found him ugly. 

Messala laughed then, low and hot and faintly bitter. “This does not feel like hate,” he said.

Judah did not disagree. He put hot hands on his cold skin instead, in all the places he could feel. For once, Messala could feel no shame in it.

***

“Do you believe in the gods?” Messala asked, one day. 

He knew the answer. They had always worshipped different gods but that had never seemed to matter; Judah had all the faith that Messala ever lacked. Perhaps Judah’s faith was all that had kept him living, when the physicians all said he would not survive another winter. 

Winter then turned to spring and into summer; Messala did not die. He learned to laugh again, learned all the planes and curves of Judah’s body with his palms and mouth and fingertips, learned how to feel sex without feeling when Judah’s hands were on him. He relearned everything he’d ever known about his childhood friend and more. He learned what it meant to survive.

“Do you believe in the gods?” he asked, because he knew that for his part that he still had Mars in his heart. He still wished for different outcomes. He still wished for the past as he longed for the future.

Judah’s mouth found his in the sunlight as he knelt there on the stones beside Messala’s couch, wine and heat and summer in a kiss. Messala wished he’d killed him; he couldn’t understand how he’d ever wanted him dead. 

Messala didn’t ask for forgiveness. The blank spaces where those words belonged were all that could sustain him while he learned how to be worthy of them.

**Author's Note:**

> Villa is based loosely on the notion of the villa of Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (who was _not_ the inspiration behind Messala, no matter what [this article](http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/villa-owned-by-ben-hurs-rival-identified-150216.htm) might say!


End file.
